Chapter Three

Chapter Three In 1906 Canon Rawnsley wrote a book entitled Months of the Lakes, which featured a chapter about Mardale and the hunt. Rawnsley didn’t’ like hunting but the following passage suggests either he actually went or interviewed someone who did, The following text is copied from the original. THE MARDALE SHEPHERDS' MEETING . There lies to the east of the great High Street range a little water flood the Roman soldiers looked on with delight, for it called them back to their own lakeland hills, but they looked on it too with awe, for its waters seemed as black as the Stygian lake they feared. Ages before the Romans ran their high street, this lake was cared for by the shepherd children of Neolithic times. Their camps, their burial grounds, their standing stones are with us on the fell sides that slope to this lake which we call Haweswater to-day. The Vikings gave it that name, for it means the Halse Water or Neck-Water, and the neck is the promontory that the Messand beck in lapse of centuries has made, that runs out from the north-west shore towards the Naddle forest, and so nearly divides the lake in two, that one end is called Low Water and the other High Water. An aerial view of the old lakes of Haweswater, notice the narrowing between high and low water, called the straits, the new road scar can be seen on the far side of the valley. One can get to the lake from Penrith up the Lowther valley or from Shap and Bampton, and when one has reached it one cannot linger by the shore if the sun is westering, for there is no house of call nearer than the Dun Bull, and this is a mile beyond Haweswater, beneath the Nan Bield Pass. Arrived at the Dun Bull, or, as it is called affectionately by the shepherd folk, ' Dunny,' the traveller must needs stay unless he is a pedestrian, for the road-makers were so pleased with them- selves or with the inn when they got there, that they determined to go no further. But Dunny is like Rome all roads lead to it. If one climbs from Ullswater to the gap between Kidsty Pike and High Raise, or descends by 1 Randale or goes up by High Street from Hayeswater, and comes down by Riggindale, or comes from Staveley over the Nan Bield Pass between Harter Fell and High Street, or passing up from Kendal by the Longsleddale valley descends over the Gatescarth Pass between Harter Fell and Branstree, there is but one house of call to be seen in the Mardale Vale below, and that is the Dun Bull. There is a certain feeling of royalty as well as royal welcome about this little Lakeland hostelry, for it is the ancient seat of the Kings of Mardale. In the reign of King John, so runs the tradition, a certain Hugh Holme, an outlaw by reason of the King's tyranny, found refuge here in the recesses of our Lakeland, and living in a cave under Riggindale Crag became the chieftain of the wild dalesmen here about. One, Rudolphus Holme, of the same family in the fourteenth century built an oratory where the Mardale Church stands, and from that time to the present the Holme family have lived on in the dale. The one house of call, the Dun Bull, is but the natural outcome of the hospitality of the Kings of Mardale. They, when owners of the one house at Mardale Green, were ever willing to entertain angels unawares, and as the tourist became less of a ram avis, they enlarged their house for his reception. Still to day in part of the building lives the last of the royal line during the summer months. One does not wonder that a refugee in King John's time found rest to his foot and safety from the terrors of the law in this unfrequented valley. It is still so remote that it is without benefit of police. If a gentleman in blue came to Mardale they would not know whether he belonged to the military or civil arm. So out of the world is this part of the Lake Country that a legend has it there was once, for lack of an almanac, a quarrel between the clerk and the priest of the chapelry of the neighbour dale, Swindale, as to whether it was Saturday or Sunday, — and as for Greenwich time the clocks go their own gate and time o' dale and time o' day are what the shepherds like to make it. It is true that the Mardale folk have a tradition that a kind of weird aerial clock is heard striking the hour on still days above Bampton Moor, so that it would seem as if the good angels that tell the hours are determined the dalesfolk shall not suffer from being sixteen miles from a clock. But once at least in the year Mardale has ' a gay good getherin o fwoke fra far and near.' On the third Saturday of November, the shepherds' meeting of the year is held at Mardale. Determining to combine pleasure with business, a hunt is organised, and after the sheep are sorted out and claimed, the rest of the day is spent in merriment and cheer. It was Friday evening, November 17th, that a lover of the shepherd life and shepherd customs of the dales found himself at the Shap station and began his walk of nine miles towards the nick in the grey hills that told where Nan Bield lay. He passed through the long straggling village street of Shap, out by the trim garden patches and orchards and on by the quaint quickset hedges cut into 2 forms of birds by careful village ' topiarians,' and gained the undulating bleak country with its gleaming white grey walls, its scattered farms surrounded by sheltering trees, and descended to Bampton. Away on the Knipe Scar to his right were, he knew, remains of Druid worship, away in the hollow of the moorland to his left the monks of Shap had left their mark — Shap Abbey, beloved of the ' good Lord Clifford ' of old, and perhaps his burial place, lay there. Below him the Lowther sparkled in the keen frosty air through meadows grey with hoarfrost. On went the pilgrim through Bampton, whose little village school gave in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries honourable judges to the Woolsack, and bishops to the Bench, and taught its classics so well in the beginning of the nineteenth century that it was said of the Bampton hinds ' they ploughed their fields in Latin.' As he wandered through Bampton he could not help being in mind of a certain yeoman family that sent forth, in the person of Hogarth the painter, the greatest satirist of the brush England ever produced; in a previous generation it gave to Troutbeck the greatest satirist with his tongue, in humble life, the Lake Country knew. Thence on, over the Lowther where the pearl oysters used to abound, and away to Haweswater, the road led the wanderer by Thornthwaite Hall on the left, where ' Belted Will ' is said to have died after a hunting day in the pleasant meadow between the road and Haifa beck — Haifa so written to- day, but surely Halsa in the olden time, for it is the beck that flows from Halsewater. In sight now of Haweswater, what most strikes the traveller is the darkness, the ebon blackness of its gloomy flood at this late season of the year, for the sun passes very early beyond the hills to the north and west, and the gloom of the lake seems intensified by the purple blackness of the heather on the hills near by, and the sombre russet of the leafless Naddle Forest on the far side of the lake. Not a sheep, not a shepherd is to be seen. Yet this entire valley was once filled with the wild tribesman's life. There on the right are the five vast mounds we call to day the Giants' Graves. A little higher on the hill is the ancient camp enclosure of Winyates; the Menhir or Standing Stones, called to-day Four Stones, are further along on the ridge, and Dry-Barrows and Beck Barrows are some of the many memories on the near hill of the long-forgotten races passed away. Forward now the road goes, by Measand Beck and Measand School — school chiefly famous for having trained an estates man’s son to become an eminent Bishop of Carlisle, Bishop Law, whose Ellenborough descendants became famous as lawyers and statesmen. The sky is red-golden in the west and the glow flushes all the children's faces as they come tumbling out of school. There were different hours kept at Measand School for Mardale children in the old time. One of the rules of the founder of it prescribed that school should commence at 6 a.m. and go on with an intermission of one hour for breakfast, 3 one hour for dinner, till 6 p.m. It was a long day's grind for dominie as for children, but it gave us sturdy scholars and well-furnished brains. The old School at Measand. Mardale A shepherd passes by with twenty ' Herdwicks ' bound for the Dun Bull, and the Shepherds' Meeting. " It's gan to be a nippy neet I'se thinkin', and ivvry way it's mappen like a fine daay for t'do up at t'Dunny tomorrer," he said.

Load more